Grooming Tools

This range of objects was collected over the Local Wisdom Project. Over these years we gathered a whole host of the physical tools of garment ‘use’. These include the combs, brushes, rollers, hangers, clothes pegs, mending tape and powder, haberdasher’s notions, which together with the hands that use them, work to maintain a garment through life and time. The activities they allow include the mending and brushing, de-pilling and polishing, pinning and washing that have taken place with more or less regularity over different eras.

These tools were originally collected by Kate Fletcher and Katelyn Toth-Fejel for a participatory tending and grooming station at the Craft of Use event at the London College of Fashion in 2014. The concept for this collection was drawn from the stories of ‘action tools’ that came out of the Local Wisdom project.